1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording apparatus that ejects, from a nozzle thereof, ink toward a recording medium and thereby records an image thereon.
2. Discussion of Related Art
There has been known an ink-jet recording apparatus that includes a carriage; an ink-jet recording head mounted on the carriage; an ink tank provided at a position remote from the carriage; and a tube that supplies the ink from the ink tank to the ink-jet recording head.
In this sort of ink-jet recording apparatus, the carriage is moved with acceleration and accordingly pressure changes are produced in the ink-supply channels. If those pressure changes are directly transmitted to the nozzles of the ink-jet recording head, then the properties of droplets of inks, ejected by the recording head, are changed so that an image may be recorded with a lowered quality because of, e.g., occurrence of white spots. To deal with this problem, Patent Document 1 proposes to employ a method in which an ink-deliver chamber equipped with a damping means that damps the pressure changes is provided above the ink-jet recording head, so as to attenuate the adverse influences of acceleration produced by the movement of the carriage.
The damping means, disclosed by Publication of Japanese Patent No. 3520658, includes a damper frame having elliptic pressure-absorb chambers (i.e., ink-deliver chambers), and the inks supplied from the ink tanks via the tubes flow into respective flow passages that are connected to respective inlets of the pressure-absorb chambers from the underside in a tangential direction, and flow from respective outlets formed at respective lower portions of the pressure-absorb chambers toward the ink-jet recording head. Each of the pressure-absorb chambers (i.e., the ink-deliver chambers) has one surface that is defined by a flexible film.